Dagoberto Rodriguez Cuba, b. 1969
La Habana Refugee Camp IV, 2024
Watercolor on paper
51 x 51 inches
129.5 x 129.5 cm
129.5 x 129.5 cm
Dagoberto Rodríguez’s “La Havana Refugee Camp IV” asserts that Havana itself has become a vast, self-contained zone of internal exile. In a monumental isometric watercolor, the artist reconfigures the city’s...
Dagoberto Rodríguez’s “La Havana Refugee Camp IV” asserts that Havana itself has become a vast, self-contained zone of internal exile. In a monumental isometric watercolor, the artist reconfigures the city’s iconic harbor into a dotted blue bay flanked by forking landmasses, where rectilinear buildings in muted tones are stacked like modular units amid green patches and snaking paths, evoking the prefabricated sprawl of a permanent refugee camp rather than a gateway to the world. Infrastructure that once promised mobility now serves as provisional shelters for an exodus that never leaves, symbolizing entrapment in systemic inequality and aid-dependent stasis. Rodríguez constructs the scene by first building precise 3D digital models from satellite imagery using Lego bricks, then transcribing them into watercolor; the toy’s mass-produced, consumerist modularity—rooted in the illusion of playful creation—collides with the harsh reality of displacement, distancing the viewer while parodying the impermanence of camp architecture and exposing the global power imbalances that render entire populations disposable. Conceptually, the work delivers an unequivocal indictment of revolutionary promise reduced to bureaucratic containment, where the once-utopian capital functions as its own holding pen of scarcity, surveillance, and indefinitely suspended futures.
Exhibitions
The Havana Refugee Camp series was shown across several exhibitions preceding this work, including "Solar Storm," Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Paris (February 18 – April 15, 2023), which featured Havana Refugee Camp I, 2023, and "Embodied Echoes: Stories of the Foreign Soul," Piero Atchugarry Gallery at Magazzini Van Axel, Venice (April 17 – June 29, 2024), which featured Havana Refugee Camp, 2023, Dadaab Refugee Camp, 2023, and Zaatari Refugee Camp, 2024. The present work, at 129.5 x 129.5 cm, is the largest and the only square composition among the Havana versions.
"Geometría de la Piel Errante" (Solo exhibition), LGM Galería, Bogotá, Colombia, April 25 – June 7, 2025. (Focused presentation of the ongoing Havana Refugee Camp series.)